Child domestic slavery
The alarming rate of poverty and ignorance of some parents have been alibis for handing over underage children, especially the girl-child to agents for trafficking as domestic helps. These girls that still need educational, parental, spiritual, and emotional guidance are trafficked into our homes to be in charge of our chores.
The condition of a majority of the girls that are still struggling to grasp what life is all about is so pathetic. Their mental and physical health are swept under the carpet, expected to work tirelessly like robots, with precision and accuracy like atomic clocks, being the first to wake up and the last to go to bed, the emotional pains created by loneliness due to the absence of peers to socialise with, subjugation to works beyond physical limits, sleeping on mats and matrasses that lack the resilience to absorb the stresses accumulated in the body, the physical, verbal and sexual abuses some have to go through and above all the lack of education are not enough reasons to let them enjoy the fruit of their labour.
These greedy agents collect the salaries, make the necessary deductions, save and send the remnant to the child’s parents. The tactic of not letting them access to their wages is to starve them of the necessary resources to escape this modern form of slavery. Some parents install CCTV surveillance cameras all over the house as a means of protecting their children against the retaliatory tendencies from abused house helps. Unless such parents are willing to install the cameras in places such as bedrooms, toilets, and stores, abused house helps may still find means of circumventing such technologies to take retaliatory majors. Moreso, parents need to understand that, the abuse of a house help is an indirect signal to children to follow suit now or in the future. Hence, breeding children that lack sympathy and lack the most basic sense of responsibility
It’s about time people regain conscience and stop patronising under aged girls that deserve education and a better life. At least, matured and grownups can be sought after if keeping a house help becomes a necessity. After all, some of the house helps never chose to be under any body’s abuse and control, but for the negligence of their ignorant parents and greediness of their traffickers.
Yahya Idris, Abuja.